


Sidewinder, Microcosm (The Happy Endings Remix)

by PhoenixFalls



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, POV Female Character, Parallel Universes, Post-Apocalypse, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-25 13:12:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7534042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/pseuds/PhoenixFalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanda wakes, and knows the world is wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sidewinder, Microcosm (The Happy Endings Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Four Quiet Lives Natasha Never Lived, and How It Always Turned Out](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7370191) by [likeadeuce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/likeadeuce). 



Wanda wakes, and knows the world is wrong.

She and Pietro are curled around each other in the ruins of a Soviet-era apartment. The drone of Chitauri engines overhead tells her a patrol is doing a sweep and she pulls Pietro closer. His bony shoulders under her arms are achingly familiar, muscle memory from a thousand nights spent thus, but they are wrong too.

They don’t belong here.

Her memories are doubled from that point forward. She and Pietro are scavenging in the bombed out parts of Novi Grad, dodging press-gangs and other scavengers alike; she and a strange American (male, mid-40s, dirty blonde hair and weary but kind blue eyes) are training together in a facility that is all clean lines and high technology. She can, if pressed, distract a single pursuer from their purpose long enough to get under cover; she has enough power to hypnotize a crowd of hundreds and bend them to her will. The world is enslaved, yoked to the joined will of Loki and the Chitauri; the world is free, or as free as it ever was before this apocalypse rained down from the sky.

She doesn’t tell Pietro.

Then one day she spots the American out of the corner of her eye, here, in Novi Grad’s museum district. She is following him before she thinks about it, Pietro in her wake for once, his curiosity and concern a palpable tension at her side.

The American has all the same skills he has in the other set of memories – he takes (and makes) impossible potshots at Chitauri flyers with his absurdly advanced bow and arrows; he moves through the rubble like an acrobat, leaping and flipping and always landing on his feet.

He has eyes like a hawk, and spots his shadows in no time.

He seems to think they are strays in need of adoption. Wanda doesn’t disillusion him. Pietro is just glad to have another body to alternate watches with.

There is a rightness to working at Barton’s side. Wanda wants more of it.

Her memories grow more populated. Another American, blonde, blue-eyed, dressed in a Captain America uniform more skintight than Wanda would have thought practical but also showing evidence of battles fought in mended tears and burned patches. A Black American with mechanical wings and a mouth perpetually turned up in a smirk. A woman with bright red hair whose voice bore just the faintest shades of sounds more pleasing to Wanda’s ear than the voices of all the others.

And increasingly there is a man, skin the color of brick and forehead studded with a yellow jewel, who looks at Wanda with a softness in his eyes that she simultaneously yearns for and shrinks from.

She walks, in her dreams, looking for them.

Two, she finds. Wilson wears a uniform scavenged from at least three different services that Wanda recognizes, is part of a unit of similarly motley guerilla soldiers camping in the ruins of Washington D.C. His medkit sees far more action than his sidearm.

Romanova is covered in dirt most days, farming an idyllic meadow ringed by snow-capped peaks, part of a shell-shocked but still hopeful-seeming community. Wanda cannot reconcile her to the woman in her visions until a band of looters tumble out of the treeline and start grabbing every young woman they can see.

Then Romanova unslings the longbow from its habitual place across her shoulders and begins to wield it, to exactly the same devastating effect that Barton does. The looters do not stand a chance.

But when she goes looking for the Captain, all Wanda finds is cold. Cold, and dark, the bitterness of salt water or tears. She asks Barton to tell her war stories in the night, wondering about a plane drowned in the Arctic.

And when she goes looking for the brick-colored man, she finds chaos. Electricity sings through her veins, code streams across the backs of her eyelids, a cacophony of voices thunder in her ears. The first time she wakes instantly, mouth filled with the taste of blood; slowly she learns to pull sense from the pandemonium, funneling off individual streams of information from the torrent.

Two voices begin to take shape in her head. One belongs to the brick-colored man; he has an English accent, and speaks with a diffidence that doesn’t particularly care to hide his sly sense of humor. Wanda wakes smiling when she pulls that voice free at last.

The other voice reminds her of far older, darker dreams. Of death and destruction, panic and despair and the desire for vengeance burning constantly in her gut. The embers are still there, banked by more immediate needs; but Wanda will never be free of the desire to see Tony Stark torn apart the way her family was.

She flees from her visions when Stark comes to prominence in them. A universe where she could work with him is no universe she wants any part of.

But having reached him once, she cannot help but return. Eventually she understands that the voice that should belong to her brick-colored man here belongs to Stark’s slave A.I., and she hates Stark the more for it. He is surrounded still by all the trappings of his wealth and decadence, holed up in a bunker of some sort, laughing and joking even now in the wreckage of the world. Wanda wishes she had the power to hurt him, even a little.

Then she watches him don a mechanical suit and fly directly into a battle between a Chitauri battalion and an overmatched group of guerrillas that remind Wanda of Wilson’s outfit, and he turns the tide against the aliens, transforming a rout into a victory.

Even that Wanda could have dismissed, rich American playing hero; but she could not deny that he devoted the majority of his energy to shielding the more vulnerable people on the ground, and he did not disappear in the aftermath, retracting his faceplate and removing his gauntlets to help with triage and first aid in the aftermath.

Their luck runs out soon after; they’re caught in the open during a sweep and get rounded up and put on a transport heading to the vibranium mines. Barton has a broken arm; Pietro likely has a concussion; Wanda’s knee is swollen so badly they have to cut her boot and the bottom half of her pants off, and there’s a stabbing pain in her side when she breathes too deeply.

Wanda clutches Pietro’s hand and casts her mind frantically outward. If Stark has decided to play hero in these dark days, he owes them a rescue.

Stark’s bunker actually belongs to an organization called S.H.I.E.L.D., and Barton has a history with them. Wanda has severe misgivings when she explains a little of her visions and sees the avariciousness in Stark’s eyes; but Barton bristles by her side, ready to step in, and Stark’s slave A.I. speaks up to caution its master about the importance of consent in scientific research involving human subjects.

They find an uneasy balance in each other’s company over time. It gets easier with each new person Wanda brings into the fold, slowly building the team she knows ought to have come together before.

There is one secret Wanda is determined to keep. Despite the hundreds of millions of people senselessly slaughtered, she would not trade this universe for the other one. Because in that one Pietro is gone, ripped from her by a hail of bullets in an act of heroism she will not forgive but cannot forget.

All she can do is resolve it will never happen here.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a reference to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song "Parallel Universe."


End file.
